Up first thing this morning to see how Mona was getting on. But I didn't need to open the door to the laundry: it was already open!
Clearly we have a door-opener. By contrast, Bruno can't even open the door when it's ajar. Of Mona herself there was nothing to
be seen.
Waited a while, but still no Mona. Yvonne spent some time
looking under armchairs, and finally found something under the sofa that moved from one
position to another the next time she looked. Mona? A little later we heard a sound that
could have been a cat. Where was she? Nothing to be seen under the sofa, so we turned it
on its back and took a look:
That's a cable for the recliner at the left. Somebody must have put it under part of the
frame. And it didn't work, but that was only because the cable had been disconnected from
the power supply.
And there seems to be no way to get further inside the sofa without destroying something.
Yvonne was concerned that Mona might have got into a place where she couldn't get out again.
But that seemed unlikely given that she had been able to move around before, so we left it.
Our biggest concern was that she doesn't seem to have eaten anything since she arrived here.
A few hours later I saw her on the windowsill in the dining room. Looked timid, but she let
me approach her and stroke her, purred and seemed relatively happy. But then she was off
again, and a too-enthusiastic greeting from the dogs did nothing to make her more confident.
And for the first time we heard Bruno hiss.
More gone Mona, until the evening, when she came out again. Let me stroke her, but walked
on, and a bit later she was gone again. Clearly this is going to be a long process. Left
her in the lounge room (I think) for the night, with the door to laundry (litter tray and
food) open.
And her door-opening? That's a serious issue. This stupid house door latch can't be
effectively locked from the inside. It can be locked, of course, but you just need to push
on the handle to unlock it, and any cat can do that. So we're going to have to replace it.
In the meantime Yvonne came up with this mechanism:
But that proved to be less than convenient, and I'm concerned that she could disable it by
pushing sideways on the rod. So we put in something more difficult to move:
Continued with the photo processing so rudely interrupted by the crash yesterday. And it happened again! In each case it happened while I was
processing photos on despise.lemis.com, a virtual machine running on hydra.
What caused it? Yesterday I had guessed a network adapter hang, based on the fact that
everything else seemed to work, but I couldn't ping the machine, and any attempt to
start a program hung, presumably because the PATH includes directories on other
machines. But for some reason ARP seemed to work. Is
that a counterindication? Other possibilities might include overheating, but I didn't have
the issue when processing my house photos, which also maxes out 32 cores. And despise processes 32 images simultaneously,
accessing eureka:/Photos via Samba, so it places quite a load
on the network.
For the time being I'll assume that it's the network adapter. I'll install the driver for
the other interface Real Soon Now, and in the meantime there's just despair
(.lemis.com). And that works, though significantly slower.
For some reason I found myself using fossil.lemis.com, Yvonne's phone, today. I wanted to access my local index, simplified for mobile
telephones. But it wasn't there. How do I enter it? The URL isn't designed even for
keyboards, let alone toy glass keyboards.
But there was nothing for it. Try to
type http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no into
the thing. Yes, says Google, you
mean http://www.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no, right?
No, you
idiot, http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no.
Don't try to outguess me. But I couldn't find a way to enter the URL.
OK, install firefox, which for
some reason wasn't on the phone. Ah, you mean Firefox Fast & Private Browser?
No, I mean firefox. But I couldn't find it. OK, install the Fast &
Private Browser, with a tasteful dark blue background. And yes, it works. Is this a
different product, or just modern terminology for the old firefox that I know and
hate? At least today it showed one advantage over Google Chrome.
So things are on the mend. She keeps disappearing somewhere, and clearly the other
animals worry her, but things seem to be improving. In the evening she stayed on my lap for
some time, though clearly Bruno's presence worried her.
Last time I was in Geelong for my eye checkup, Estelle asked me about paying my bill: $500 outstanding. But that
should only have been $250, and finally I got round to checking. Yes, deducted far too
early on 15 March. It looks for all the world like an organizational slipup.
So what's going on? I received an estimate ahead of time for the sum they're asking, but
clearly that was before they contacted Bupa, my medical insurers. OK, print out all the documents I have, not helped by the
fact that Google Chrome produces PDFs that my printer
doesn't want to know.
Call up Bupa, supply obligatory date of birth (8 digits please) to the voice menu. OK,
19480817. Wrong! I want DDMMYYYY. Why do people do this? There should be a prohibition
of using date of birth for authentication. Also, more logically, the membership number.
“We have an estimated wait time of between 13 and 19 minutes. Want a call back?”. OK.
70 minutes later I gave up and tried again, this time being routed differently by their
voice non-recognition system. First to Daclin ([spelling?]), who transferred me to
the correct queue, where the waiting time was down to 7 to 10 minutes. Held on, spoke to
Lachie ([spelling?]), who was not very easy to understand (maybe VoIP quality issues somewhere?), but who
ultimately told me that there can be up to 4 bills for a procedure: the hospital (paid, that
was the $250), the surgeon, assistant doctors and the anaesthetist. In my case no assistant
doctors were involved, but Medicare and Bupa only pay up to a fixed amount for the the surgeon and anaesthetist
(Medicare 75%, Bupa only 25%), so their bills are outstanding, in more sense than one: my
$250 has suddenly increased to nearly $1000, and there's the possibility of another $730 or
so for this month's operation. A far cry from what Nick told me four months ago. They're going to look into that.
On the positive side, the whole thing only took 20 minutes, including waiting time. And I
note that in December I had the same issues with their voice non-recognition system and the
sound quality.
In the first photo, she looks like a brown Burmese, but in the second she looks
almost chocolate. That's exactly what we saw with the photos that Helen sent her on Friday,
and which I still haven't been able to save. But this seems to be an artefact of the
camera: she looks brown to then naked eye.
But then I looked at the pedigree. According to that, the sire is lilac, dam is chocolate.
There's no way that that combination can lead to a brown offspring. What had the GCCF been thinking to accept that pedigree? But
then it occurred to us that we had seen the mother, and she's brown, not chocolate. Still,
it's puzzling.
That's also a brown Burmese. So there's more to this issue than meets the eye.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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